SEATTLE—The Eddie Johnson you think you know would have been pushed to the breaking point on Wednesday night.

Harried constantly by Sporting Kansas City’s voracious defense, the lazy Eddie Johnson would have been unwilling to do the extra work the game demanded. No matter that his Seattle Sounders took the field saddled with a five-game MLS winless streak. Soccer is supposed to be fun, and thankless running off the ball and a physical, in-your-face opponent are anything but.

The unfocused Eddie Johnson probably would have been distracted by a trio of early offside calls. Blaming the referee is easy. If that didn’t do it, then surely those two first-half misses would have knocked the striker off his game, leading him to question either his own competence or that of his teammates.

The unprofessional Eddie Johnson would have been furious when substituted toward the end of a taught 1-1 contest before a season-high crowd of nearly 47,000 fans. The man you think you know is interested only in the limelight, and heroes don’t get replaced by Sammy Ochoa in the 80th minute of a tie game.

That Eddie Johnson would have been in a sour mood afterward. I had an interview with him scheduled for the following day but had hoped to introduce myself that night. It didn’t happen—not because Johnson was avoiding the press, but because he was off in a private area adjacent to the Sounders’ locker room playing with his six-year-old daughter.

“Now that she’s getting older she’s starting to understand the game more. It’s always, ‘I want to be one of the little kids who walks out and holds your hand before the game’,” Johnson said with a smile on Thursday. “She’s always wanted to come into the locker room after the game. I’m always the last one there. I take my time after games and try to do all the things that are required to get that full recovery, if it’s an ice bath, if it’s getting the right amount of fluids, stretching.”

His daughter Zoë, Johnson said, helps remind him that matches like Wednesday’s aren’t the end of the world. In fact, the challenges they present offer an opportunity to demonstrate growth, to find some perspective as he reboots his career and to be “the best role model I can be.”

God-given skill will take a player only so far. A lot of what makes a successful soccer career comes from places above the feet. The Eddie Johnson you think you know isn’t the one who maintained every bit of his work ethic, composure and focus on Wednesday despite the aforementioned on-field adversity. He’s not the doting and disciplined player who tended to his body, his emotions and his daughter in the bowels of CenturyLink Field following the match. Nor is he the gracious and affable Eddie Johnson I met the following day, when he spoke at length about his life and his game, asked me questions about mine, and gave me a guided tour of the club’s practice facility south of Seattle. I had asked for around 20 minutes of his time. I got 90—a full game’s worth.

The accepted narrative positions Johnson, 28, as a cautionary tale. He was good enough to score goals in MLS (41 in seven seasons after turning pro at age 17) and was a reserve on the 2006 World Cup team, but when he moved to Europe in 2008, we’re told that his lack of focus, patience and professionalism caught up with him. Four years earlier, his 17-minute hat trick in a World Cup qualifier against Panama had left American soccer fans salivating. But at Fulham, a club well known for being kind to U.S. players, he was a disaster. Johnson never scored for the Cottagers and was loaned out to two teams in the English second division and Greece’s Aris Thessaloniki. When his contract with Fulham expired last summer, he’d tallied just seven goals in three-and-a-half years abroad.

But that wasn’t rock bottom. Over the next few months, Johnson’s life unraveled. Following the sudden death of a younger cousin with whom he was very close, “I completely shut down. I didn’t want to play soccer anymore,” Johnson told Sporting News.

Then in early August, his image took another hit when his wife was arrested at a Florida hotel for ramming his car with her Jeep following a dispute. A couple of weeks later, an apparent agreement to return to MLS fell apart under mysterious circumstances.

Last December, Johnson tried to pull himself out of his rut, seeking help from a sports psychologist at the IMG Academies in Bradenton, Fla. and going on trial at Mexican Primera División club Puebla FC, which employed Johnson’s friend and former U.S. teammate, DaMarcus Beasley. But in January, Puebla announced that Johnson had failed his physical. Johnson claims he was fit and that it was a dispute between Puebla’s coach and technical director that scuttled the deal, but the damage was done. The narrative apparently was confirmed.

“I know the truth, but to the whole world, it’s ‘Eddie’s out of shape.’ Now how are teams going to look at me? It hurt me. It really did. I finally decided, I’m going to come back to MLS,” he said.

His reputation wrecked, he signed a two-year contract in February for just over $100,000 per season. In ’07, his last in MLS before moving abroad, he made eight times that amount.

His destination: Seattle, which sent a pair of popular players, Mike Fucito and Lamar Neagle, to the expansion Montreal Impact for Johnson’s rights.

“Of course there are questions. You think ‘What’s going on here?’” Sounders veteran Brad Evans said about the initial reaction to the trade. “Initially, you get that stigma of what you read in the press. That’s our only access.”

But Johnson made an excellent first impression. This was a scoring chance he wasn’t going to waste.

“He came into the first training session and we were doing one-touch and I was surprised at how fit he was and how good his touch was and right away, I was like, “Okay, this is good. This is going to be a good fit’,” Evans said. “He put his head down and worked form day one. Extra fitness with (fitness coach Dave Tenney), extra everything. He really wanted to battle and earn his place in the lineup. He had the right state of mind and still does.”

This certainly wasn’t the Eddie Johnson that Evans thought he knew. It was the Johnson that Sounders technical director Chris Henderson took a chance on. Both Henderson, a former World Cup midfielder, and Tenney had worked with Johnson back in Kansas City.

“I had the chance to really get to know the guy, and you know what little things motivate him, what his goals are, where the drive comes from,” Henderson told Sporting News while Johnson was back playing with his daughter late Wednesday night. “We had very different backgrounds. He has a different background that most of the guys in our locker room. But he’s driven to succeed. The key is working with him and trying to find the things that are going to make him a positive for the group and the team.”

When I asked Johnson on Thursday if strikers just want to be loved, if seeing the faces of happy teammates and hearing the applause from the stands fuels the burning desire to score and the emotion so evident on the field, he nodded emphatically. That may be especially true for Johnson, and Henderson knows it. The assumption is that the Sounders will tap into all that talent if the forward feels at home.

“The reputation had gotten a little bit out of control with what he had done and where he was with his life and we said, ‘Look, come here, we want to give you the environment that’s going to help you grow. We’re going to have a great training environment and we’re going to work with you in any way you want, anything you need. We’re going to help you’,” Henderson said. “He’s one of the purest American finishers. I think Clint Dempsey has it and I think Eddie Johnson has it.”

Johnson has four goals (tied for second on the team) and one assist in 12 league games this season.

My personal guided tour through the club’s Starfire Sports facility in suburban Tukwila, Washington was Johnson’s idea. He was proud of his new digs and was eager to spend time during his day off to show them to me, from the players’ lounge, to the ice baths and the old-school boot room to the current standings of the Sounders’ Euro 2012 prediction pool. This clearly was a place Johnson wants to be, both professionally and personally.

“When you’re in an organization that has confidence in you and believes in you, you don’t care what anyone else thinks because you know at the end of the day, that everyone on the inside believes in you,” Johnson said. “That’s what keeps you sane when things aren’t working out on the field. It keeps you going, gets you to keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.”

As for that reputation? He’s trying to introduce the real Eddie Johnson to the world. He’s been on Twitter since March, and although he’s still somewhat bewildered by some of the negativity – “I haven’t done anything to anyone. Nothing. I don’t know where the perception came from,” he said – he’s willing to endure it in an effort to connect with fans. And he’s happy to go above and beyond a reporter’s expectations as well. Not many athletes spend more time with the press than they need to. Not many express their gratitude for the opportunity. Johnson may not understand why some fans resent him, but it wasn’t difficult to discern why the Sounders are happy he’s around.

“If you talk to your buddies, other writers, tell them if they want to interview me, they can interview me too,” he said as we wrapped up on Thursday. “All of these people haven’t had this one-on-one time with me like you’re having. That’s why I appreciate you coming to sit down with me so you can really see who I am. All these people who have this perception have been going on what they hear through this or that person. If you really want to know me, take the time out. I’m a nice guy.”